Scenario Design 101 - Art of War #2 Map Making Part One

SPWaW is a tactical squad-level World War II game on single platoon or up to an entire battalion through Europe and the Pacific (1939 to 1945).

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Wild Bill
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Post by Wild Bill »

Those are some very good practical suggestions, Mosh. You have been doing your homework and mine too ;)

And as you say, and let me re-emphasize, doing is the key. No one will ever get much out of these little lessons unless they take the time to practice, to draw, to experiment.

I can't urge you enough to do this. There simply is no other way to become somewhat proficient at map making except trial and error.

Of course, if we can move a few rocks out of your path, so much the better. But we can't walk the path for you. It is one you must trod.

While you are at it, practice mixing terrains. Swamps are edged usually in mud and high grass with foliage.

Streams and rivers don't have beaches normally, but are very green and often rough.

Be realistic, but leave the map playable. That is important. Check for LOS in areas where you want it. You can do that by purchasing a few units and using them to test just what they can and cannot see.

More to come....


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Post by RockinHarry »

Hello all
Originally posted by Wild Bill:
Harry, this is a forum. Feel free to chip in with ideas from Fred's fine program!
Yeah, I just meant, that it might confuse more than it helps, to mention about certain capabilities in Freds Editor! :eek:

There are a lot of tricks that can be done in the SPWAW Editor itself and I find it best, to cover them first in this thread.
....and I don´t want to interfere with the teacher. :o
Higher terrain can be done, but not within the game. It is tricky and done with Chlanda's map editor. I don't know how to do it. Redleg and others are better at that than I.
My experience is (with redlegs support),
that it is possible to build Level 40/50 (and higher) hills in Freds Editor....But it´s a lot of work and I think it´s beyond the scope of this thread, to explain it here. :eek: (Not for quick successes...)

I´m just preparing a "How to..." guide, with a tips n´tricks section for Freds MapEdit and it also has the appropriate tables.
For PBear, I think there is a terrain effects list in the manual. I'll look. I have one somewhere.
You can also open the terrain.txt file in SPWAW main directory for a quick view.
Some terrain DefenseValues are still missing though. (hedges, RR, RR-bridges, wrecks and shellholes for example)

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Post by Wild Bill »

Please do it, Harry. I'd love to have such a tutorial...Wild Bill
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Post by RockinHarry »

Originally posted by ectizen:

extra edit to add: However that raises a question: Is the depth of the water in any way related to its height? Is a -3 Coral Reef possible? How about -1 Deep Water?

I'll have my fine-toothed comb at the ready, awaiting your response :)
Hi ectizen,

This is a really good question!

I found out, that some terrain classes in SPWAW are also to be differentiated by their "height" value.
Actually, there seems to be no "height" of below "zero" at all!
-1,-2,-3 are Flags for certain terrain classes. Change them and you likely get a different terrain showing up!
Everything below -3 seems to be treated by SPWAW as (deep) water.

You also might see these grass hexes with +1 height added to the basic terrain. Actually, SPWAW uses just terrain alterations of 5 and anything other than this, doesn´t seem to influence LOS at all. So this +1 "height" is just a flag.

Ok,...enough confusion for today. :D

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Post by ectizen »

Hi RockinHarry!

Having spent way too many hours toiling away in front of the map editor, Fred's WAWMap, and a couple of custom tools of my own design ;), I think I've fathomed the negative height thing. It seems to be a combination of both height and flag.
-3 is sea level, and very wet. It is completely surrounded by wet terrain.
-2 is a little higher, and can be described as usually wet ground: canals, swamps, river banks. Gullies are an exception - but since they seem to be dry streams, that's ok.
-1 is a little higher again, but still not at ground level. It can be wet (marshes) or dry (beaches, trenches).
0 is ground level. Usually dry.
We can have both -3 Shallow Water, and -3 Deep Water because the height is the surface, not the depth.
The flag aspect is seen in swamps and marshes - the only difference between the two is the height (and the tiles). Oh, also in ditches and streams.
I think I have grasped this. Now all I need is for someone to come along tell me it's all wrong :).

Now, to the other end of the altimeter: the very high terrain. I would greatly appreciate some info about building thing in WAWMap. If I can figure out how it's done, I'll be able to finish the Mountainiser! Currently, the Mountainiser only produces weird maps, like the 60 height hill with a 25 height slope down to 50 height, and the 10 height hill with the 5 height slope down to the 20 height plains below :eek:
Feel free to email me, if you have something on this, but don't want to subject everyone else in this thread to such obscure trivialities. :)
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Post by Don »

Harry is correct - learning about WAWMAP at this stage would be like trying to learn advanced car mechanics while still learning to do a tune-up. For the people just learning to make maps, you'll have to learn what the SPWAW map editor can and cannot do before you can go on to see what WAWMAP can add to it.

As WB suggested, just practice using all of the buttons, just to see how things work. Lay out a stream and see how the underlying terrain changes. Lay RR track with different terrain under it to see how it looks. Look at maps done by WB and others to see how they do things.

After laying terrain, look at it from different zoom levels. Extensive right-clicking can result in un-natural looking hexagonal blobs of terrain that don't look right - be sure to break those up.
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Post by Wild Bill »

Our training guru has spoken wisely. Don has made amazing progress in both map making and scenario design over the last six months.

It is proof that this stuff is learnable and fun.

ECit...your analysis is excellent on the various levels. Sorry I can't be of help on those high hills.

Perhaps we'll get it in the game one day. It's been relatively low in the list of priorities all through the evolution of SPWAW.

It is something we want and hope some day to have.

I've learned again and again that you can always "make do" with this editor.

As a side note of interest, did you know that the SP editor was almost not included in the game?

I was on the beta team for that version (and the others) and I remember that it was discussed.

The editor initially was only a tool to create some scenarios for the game. NO ONE anticipated that this then unappreciated feature would continually rejuvenate the game and keep it alive far past the life-span of most games.

Nice to have it now, isn't it?

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Post by skukko »

Editor in the game has kept this thing alive and will keep it kicking far beyond of what we can imagine. Editor's future is unknown to me, but what I've seen, is that it is getting a bit enhancements.

B]Editing Map:[/B] Remember/ note that right click and left click have differend outcome. For example if you build level 10 and click it with rightMbutton level 10 comes to 0. If you click it with lefMB level 10 comes to 5. This works in all heights.

In fifth release mud/swamp/rough -terrain movement has more penalties than in 4.5. If you are going to use lots of these in your map, keep in mind that vehicles get broken, immoed by terrain.

nothing more right now

mosh
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Post by panda124c »

Next question: I have built my small river 1 hex wide by laying down a string of deep water hexes. Is there any way to change the shore line from half land to full land without effecting the water hexes?? In other words I'd like to have a river 50 yd wide with a lvl 10 bank next to the deep water hexes.
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Post by ruxius »

Right obs Skukko..
The more powerful the editor is ..and then more people make that game his own terrain
of creativity...
E'body knows about this...

AS for my homework : it was very funny to notice that if you press the combination
of buttons WRITE A NAME ON THE MAP and the FILL button you are forced to fill an entire
area of text in the battlefield..
this is obvious unuseful as a discovery except for the fact that I understood that
text hexes are limited..(yes ..I know that
a limit always exists in every source code...)
but it's about the size , the amount of that that I was surprised..

After this incident I had to delete some txt to write again..
Experiments go on ....
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Post by DoubleDeuce »

Originally posted by ruxius:
Right obs Skukko..
The more powerful the editor is ..and then more people make that game his own terrain
of creativity...
E'body knows about this...

Agreed! The more control over the battlefield a gamer has as far as designing the terrain to fight on the longer life is breathed into this game.

PS. I plan to print the text of this forum and print it for future refernece. The information in here is great. Thanks all!
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Post by Wild Bill »

Thank you Double D! And the rest of you who are learning and are letting me know.

Now, an update!

NEXT CLASE AOMW # will be Monday. Now we go into the nitty-gritty and help you make your own generic type scenario. We begin with a map that you will make step by step. Don't miss it.
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Post by ectizen »

Here's the most important discovery I've made: the map terrain type buttons (summer, winter, jungle, desert & rough) don't select the type of map, but instead select the features drawn on the map. Yeah, it's obvious, especially when reading the the posts in this thread, but that doesn't mean it was obvious to me ;)
I got a kick out of putting snow-capped hills in the desert. Ok, so I'm easily amused :)

ruxius: I wish you'd mentioned what happened in a little more detail! I tried filling the map with text, thinking it would use the same text as the original hex. I didn't realise I'd have to spend the next five minutes answering about a hundred requests for a text message! :eek:

WB: I'm looking forward to the next lesson!
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Post by ruxius »

Originally posted by ectizen:
ruxius: I didn't realise I'd have to spend the next five minutes answering about a hundred requests for a text message! :eek:
ahahah..Sorry mister , I only intended to 'share' my experience... :) :)
Anyway console yourself..unaware of this (it was set a range 8 )without the functionality if the ESC button I missed many times the last entering txt box so I repeated this trail of tears three times..well I can say I paid my bill !
;) ;) ;)
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Post by ruxius »

First of all Good Easter to all of you ! An happy AP shell inside your favourite Easter egg !! :D
now New experiments..
a ) I found that map names are difficult to be read with desert background and almost impossible with winter clear terrains..
is there any way to change the text colour ?

b)how could be simulated a "cut & paste" option inside the map editor ? I have this need when I would like to have a sequence of the same kind of house without being
crazy to click on them every time ..

c) for my scenario I wuold like to have some bungalows or huts instead of wooden houses..
it could be very common in Pacific island scenarios..have you seen something similar ?
-------
Well my first Cliff has APPEARED...thank you WB !
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Post by Don »

Hi ruxius,

The text is hard to read, but during a game it will be in the darker "fog of war" and much easier to read. When you deploy, highlight a unit, then right-click to check it's LOS and the rest of the map will go dark and you'll see what I mean.

When you find a certain building that you want to use more than one of, the "z" key should "lock" the current building and you can place them all over! :)

There'll be many new buildings in 5.0, but I don't think those are in there. There is room for user-defined stuff though, so if you can make your own you can put them in.
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Post by RockinHarry »

Hi all

I found the buildings in/on winter maps looking a bit odd. Means, no snow cover on the roofs. Would you like to see snow covered buildings?

Also, I like to have a layer of darker shaded hexes beneath trees/woods and I use clear terrain tiles from "rough" terrain set for this purpose, at least for level-0 terrain. It´s looking more natural to me, than the green tiles. It has more depth...

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Post by ruxius »

Originally posted by Don :
The text is hard to read but (....)
....Or for instance you can decide to put some roads or trees just to have a less frustrating background colour around that location..
Hello Don ..Yes..a way to make it visible is still possible..also nice is using unit's LOS ....but ...

When you find a certain building that you want to use more than one of, the "z" key
(...)
Hey ! This is a very interesting and helpful answer...thank you very much for this contribute ! how did you find it ?

There is room for user-defined stuff though, so if you can make your own you can put them in.
do you mean edit a hut's image to be added to the list of the buildings' icons ? well I should steal directly from the genius of Mike Amos himself..I managed to provide myself with the PsP 7.0 and the latest version of Infraview ecc. hoping to finally edit the files *.shp (I think that terrains are represented in that format..)
but nothing to do that format is not supported by anything ...
like the other ultra-mysterious files that shows films of WWII and are included since the old SP1 the files *.smk how to play and edit them ? another great enigma !

Originally posted by RockinHarry:
I found the buildings in/on winter maps looking a bit odd. Means, no snow cover on the roofs. Would you like to see snow covered buildings?

I too noticed that..nevertheless I liked to see some fields that in winter have froze in them ..and what about the weird picture of a winter Graveyard ?

(...)
It has more depth...
[/b

and also a more expensive movement cost.. :)
But it looks fine as you write..
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Post by Don »

Hi Ruxius,
Hello Don ..Yes..a way to make it visible is still possible..also nice is using unit's LOS ....but ...
Yea, I know. But, it is what we have to work with, so we just make up ways to "deal" with it.
how did you find it ?
:) I'm getting confused about which features are in which versions, but that "z" key thing will lock the different wooden or stone buildings in 5.0. Try it in 4.5 and see if it works!

Yes, in the new version user-defined buildings can be added. Won't be long now! :D
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Post by Wild Bill »

Map Making Part Two due here very shortly. I think you'll like this one, guys. Thanks to Tankhead for his help on this one...WB
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